First Look: The Daily, Bar Bites and Cocktails from Brad Farmerie and Naren Young

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AvroKO has replaced The Monday Room—the bar next to their Elizabeth Street restaurant Public—with The Daily, a new cocktail destination that's twice as big as the former space. "It's not necessarily bar food," as you would normally think of it, said executive chef Brad Farmerie of The Daily's food offerings. "It's a bunch of funky, interesting things that accompany wine and liquor. I don't think bar food has to be heavy," he said. But he does think it should be fun.

Not every bar would offer fried whitebait (resurrected from the Double Crown menu) with lemony tartar sauce and call it "fries with eyes," or serve up a banh mi packed with 4 to 5 different pork preparations. "So often the banh mi in America are so watered down," said Farmerie. "In Vietnam, it's gutsier, meatier." His version boasts housemade rillettes and headcheese, crispy pork belly and pig's ears, as well as a variety of pickles. "You're getting tons of vegetables, getting crunch, a lot of acid, so it doesn't feel heavy," says Farmerie, who was plenty eager—gleeful, even—to help us gobble the remains of the sandwich once it was photographed.

The wine list is a bit adventurous, too, skewing toward natural wines and including orange as a category alongside red, white, and rosé.

In accordance with the bar's name, the five featured cocktails change, well, daily, along with about a third of the food menu. Why change it up so often? "We want people to come back and get to try something new," said Farmerie. (If you want to know what's on the list ahead of time, you can check on Facebook, but don't worry, the bar arsenal is prepared for special requests.)

Want a preview? Grab a stool and check out a few bites and sips from The Daily in the slideshow above.

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